Announcing appearances, publications, and occasional thoughts on natural philosophy and ancient history by philosopher, historian, and author Richard Carrier.

Richard Carrier is the renowned author of several books including Sense and Goodness without God and Proving History, as well as numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He has also become a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and the epistemology of history. For more about him and his work visit www.richardcarrier.info.

EVENTS

So when I came out as polyamorous in February, the godless Slymepit blew a gasket. But so did Christians. Their freakout was quaint. And hardly substantive. So I just filed it as something to amuse over when I had time. Now as I sit for hours in the Raleigh-Durham airport awaiting my flight home, drinking a lovely bottle of Carolina wine from the Old North State Winery, what better fun than to survey the Christian panic over poly?

First I’ll summarize a sample of some of what happened, then delve into a long treatment of the most thoughtful (albeit still totally wrong) example…

Hyperbolic whining when criticized is the male analog to the trope of women crying when criticized. So it’s ironic to see Richard Dawkings “crying” (over and over again) about a male peer being criticized for saying maybe women should be segregated from men in labs because they cry too much when criticized. Sure, Dawkins thinks Sir Tim Hunt saying that was deplorable. But he thinks nothing should come of it. We should just laugh off a Muslim scientist saying it would be better if labs were gender segregated (and not meaning it sarcastically). Because of sexist false generalizations about women, and how “women” can’t handle criticism and relationships.

Like this:

Yesterday I posted an enhanced edition of my Ohio speech on feminism. Today I am posting key material from my Portland speech that extends the same argument to a broader application, focusing on some of the recent public statements of Peter Boghossian… [Read more…]

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Lock up your wives and daughters. Polyamorous men are going to seduce them! That’s the new panic emanating from atheist anti-feminists. Along with horror at Bacchic orgies at atheist conferences, and a denigration of sexual liberation as the scourge of society and a sure sign of the decline of public morality. Christian reactionaries? Nope. This is coming from atheists. Seriously.

Anti-feminist atheists are rarely logical and always fact challenged. They live in a bubble of impenetrable mythologies like moon landing deniers and people who vote for Ted Cruz. So none of their reaction to my coming out as polyamorous ought to be surprising. But since one of them is making a lame attempt at harassing my employers, it’s time to document and make fun of it.

The featured villain of the day is some guy (?) who goes by the charming moniker Shermertron. It would be truly awesome if that was actually Michael Shermer but reality is never that sweet. I’m assuming it’s an obsessive Shermer fan. He writes a vile blog called Orwellian Garbage, which is basically just a bunch of illogical rants about me and PZ Myers that rarely contacts reality. His silly & sad sidekick goes by the moniker Yeti’s Roar who does basically the same thing on his own blog (I suppose they could be the same person).

Shermertron and his associates suffer from the following delusions:

They can’t tell the difference between sexual harassment and consensual flirting.

They can’t tell the difference between appropriate and inappropriate ways of pursuing intimacy with someone.

They can’t tell the difference between being pleasantly drunk but still in possession of your faculties (and thus fully able to consent when asked) and being so drunk as to not even comprehend what is happening or where exactly you are.

They can’t tell the difference between advocating for ethical sexuality and being against all sex.

They are also liars.

If you want the full skinny, then sit down, secure your safety belt and hang on for the ride… [Read more…]

Alas, I have been doing nonstop traveling and events and work-catchup for weeks. I haven’t even been able to get to my comments queue, so I shall soon just be clearing everything to post, probably most without response or very little response, as I have no time. I’m getting caught up on backlogged work in preparation for two events in Canada that I have to travel to later this week. I apologize for the comments delay. I had hoped to find time for it in transit, but alas I couldn’t, and likely won’t (this grueling schedule shall continue for months).

But for those who haven’t been already getting the skinny, all this happened between when I got on an airplane Thursday and landed yesterday… [Read more…]

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Yesterday was International Men’s Day. Our own Freethought Blogger, Ally Fogg (noted journalist and gender equality activist) blogged about it last weekend and then wrote a really good brief on it for The Independent, “Male Victims of Rape, Sexual Abuse and Depression: Breaking the Silence on International Men’s Day,” with the tagline, “Those who mock today are mocking victims of a viciously gendered society.” The latter is an article I think everyone should read. Though some balked or joked (as Ally notes), many feminists support the day and the ideas and goals behind it, and all certainly should: see this article in The Guardian, this article in The National Student, and this articlein The Feminist Times, all of which are feminists speaking to feminists, and make some points even Ally overlooked, so they are good reads, too. Take a tour of these articles and expand your awareness of the gendered nature of real-world problems affecting billions of human beings. It will be especially enlightening for anyone who immediately asked, at first hearing of this, “Why do we need a day for men?” The more so if you didn’t immediately think of at least half a dozen good answers.

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Ever wonder why MRAs promote hatred or hostility toward women when they actually could be doing at least something worthwhile instead? I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this in the last few days (perhaps because of speculations that MRA affiliation had something to do with Justin Vacula being asked to resign from SkepticInc, but that’s not my network so I can’t speak to that).

I’ve said before that MRA groups could have chosen to work as allies with feminists, respectful of women and women’s issues side by side with their own, even sharing contacts, resources, and models for action, just as many other special interest groups do. But that’s not the road they took.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, MRAs are Men’s Rights Activists. MRA can also mean Men’s Rights Activism collectively, but that is more commonly known as the MRM or Men’s Rights Movement. I shall be distinguishing that category (of those who specifically identify as or with men’s “rights” activists) from another, that of men’s issues advocates. There are many of the latter who are exactly what MRAs should be but aren’t: respectful and sensible campaigners for interests unique to men or affecting men in gender-distinct ways. They just don’t pompously describe what they do as advocating for men’s “rights.”

So what went wrong with the MRAs? Instead of acting like other special interest groups of merit, by and large (there may be exceptions; I rarely see them) the MRM has historically developed as a de facto hate movement, specifically in opposition to feminism (MRAs are often explicitly anti-feminist, and almost always at least implicitly so). In every organized instance I know, self-described MRAs endorse or promote sexism or misogyny in some form, and (of interest to skeptics) promote pseudoscience and conspiracy-theory-style claims about the world that are demonstrably false or dubious, but believed because they support a desired narrative or worldview.

And yet, there are those men’s issues organizations that do not identify with the MRM and are not hate groups, but actually do it right. So today I’m going to talk a little about both sides of this divide, to illustrate what “doing men’s rights rightly” would actually have looked like, if the MRM took its cue from those meritorious men’s issues organizations (and other special interest movements altogether), rather than from a baseline hate-filled worldview of delusional anti-feminism. [Read more…]

Like this:

Video of my talk at the 2013 American Atheists Convention (their 50th anniversary!) is now online. It is getting downvotes from the haters (even at one point more downs than ups). Please go watch that video (Atheism…Plus What?) and see if you can find anything in it that honestly deserves a downvote. Seriously. And if you don’t, please upvote it. Show the haters they don’t own the movement.

Others reading the comments (I can’t stomach such a task myself) tell me that the downvotes appear to be coming from people who didn’t even watch the video (or didn’t watch it all through). It appears, in fact, that these downvotes are there in an attempt to discourage people from watching the video, rather than representing disagreement with its actual content or quality or value. [You can now read a transcript and view the slideshow.]

Note that the Women in Atheism panel at AACon 2013 is also a must-view adjunct to this, since in it the women on the panel brilliantly answer some of the common questions that arose from my talk. Unfortunately that video is not yet online (I’m not sure if they are putting everything up or only select things). I will link it in here as soon as I find out it’s available. But one of the examples of what they addressed is the hyperskeptical claim that all the harassment of atheism women in our movement is done by hundreds of Christians posing as atheists, which actually should outrage you all the more if you really believed that (rather than using it as an excuse to do nothing about it). Greta Christina gave an excellent discourse on why that doubt is irrational (in short: we see the same phenomenon in every other movement, e.g. the gaming and tech industries, so we should not expect to be a miraculous exception), and other members of the panel added to that (such as pointing out that we have plenty of evidence a lot of them are atheists).

I also did a podcast last month on Atheism+ that went up just recently, in which I have a reasonable conversation with someone who disapproves of it, UK political scientist and Huffington Post blogger Tony Sobrado (listen to his Interview with Richard Carrier on Atheism Plus). No hating or flaming, and no straw men or other fallacies. He had concerns based on misunderstandings and missing or incorrect information, asked about them calmly, and gave me the opportunity to answer them. All without any atmosphere of hostility. A model for how to do this. [A convenient transcript of that interview is now available.]

That podcast was inspired by Sobrado’s Huffington Post article against Atheism+ “What Is Atheism Plus and Do We Need It?” and from listening to the ensuing podcast or reading its transcript you can see how we addressed everything in his article on that show. So anyone who may have read that and wondered how we might respond (or was angered by it and wished someone would answer it), this is the podcast for you. But the AACon video is a good introductory piece to start with. The two together tell you pretty much all you need in order to understand what we’re really advocating in the Atheism+ movement and why.